I am starting this thread in anticipation of tonight’s episode.
I had a few giggles and I liked Leonard standing up for himself. Would it have been realistic for Leonard to be able to demand his own research project? He did study with Stephen Hawking so I would think he would have some pull.
Oh yeah, “Assertive Leonard” was great!
The only real nitpick I had was when Leonard said (paraphrasing) “And if he says no, there are plenty of other universities who will want me.”
Then Sheldon says “Are there?”
My thought was yes, you dumbshit. Leonard’s a CalTech physics post-doc (from what I gather, he’s not actually a tenured professor or instructor)- I imagine there are plenty of schools who might give him a shot. It’s not like he’s a lecturer at some third tier university or something.
Isn’t the question of whether a scientist is desirable to a university dependent mostly on whether he/she can get research grants (from the government, private sector, etc)? I don’t know if that applies in the kinds of physics these guys do.
As for the episode, it was nice to see Leonard no longer being a doormat. That represents real growth on his part. Perhaps next he’ll work through his relationship with his mother or at least let her bother him less. Not sure where they were going with Raj; what he said didn’t seem that laughable.
I think Raj’s story was a (shit)take on popular science news and reporting. Also, Raj is right. Howard and Bernie are terrible friends.
Isn’t there a “Leonard gets assertive” episode in nearly every season? Sheldon and Leonard had fights about the roommate agreement, and the thermostat setting and Sheldon bumming rides to work, dentist, barber, etc.
I guess this one was to set up what happens to him after the finale.
Yes, that is what I was thinking, as well.
Leonard has gotten money (in a cringetastic episode where he slept with a donor, not in a quid pro quo, but in today’s climate I can see a wealthy person making the moves on a professor may be quite icky) and he has done a project for the Air Force. So President Seibert should want to keep him happy.
“Realistic” doesn’t really enter into it when it comes to this show’s presentation of the workings of a university. They really don’t know anything about how it works.
I wasn’t clear on exactly why Sheldon was so sure Leonard’s proposal would be rejected, and indeed why it was rejected. Coming up with research proposals and applying for grant money to study them is exactly the sort of thing Leonard should be doing all the time.
Maybe they felt his proposal was incomplete, or didn’t adequately explain what he was going to do. But if you’re rejected for reasons like that, usually you rewrite the proposal according to the feedback you’ve gotten, and you re-submit it. You don’t quit in a huff and go shopping the proposal around to other universities.
But then, a research proposal is more than just saying “I want to study X.” You come up with a specific idea for what you want to investigate, some particular question that you would like to look into, and then you propose, in detail, what you’re going to do to investigate it, plus an estimate of how much it’s going to cost. It’s a formal written document, possibly 10 pages long (or more). Not something you whip up overnight, and not something you just drop off at the President’s office so that he can give you an answer right then and there.
In fact, the President likely has nothing to do with it. Generally there’s a committee that evaluates research proposals. I’ve served on that committee, and believe me, the University President was never at any of the meetings.
I’ll forgive them for having Penny act like he was applying for a new job, rather than submitting a research proposal. That’s Penny, and she probably doesn’t understand what he’s doing.
TL,DR: Don’t look to The Big Bang Theory for accurate information regarding the process of doing scientific research.
Putting all that aside, I did get a few chuckles out of the episode. It was better than last week’s. It’s always somewhat surprising to see that Anu is still in the picture. I do wonder if she and Raj are going to end up married (or at least engaged) in the end after all.
The bound document being handled by Leonard, Sheldon, Penny, and Siebert was thicker than ten pages. It looked to me to be at least 1/2" thick.
More likely that Sheldon and Siebert thought it to be either even theoretically impossible given the current state of physics, or written by a physics fan-boy and/or so shoddy that the person who submitted it should never be considered to lead a project of that scope.
An interesting reason (more interesting than the show has been willing to entertain) would be “Leonard, a project leader needs to be able to make difficult decisions that will make some people unhappy - and in spite of this week’s sudden burst of assertiveness, the university can’t bet on the 1 in a million chance that you will continue to be decisive and non-grovelly long enough to make this project work. You’re a fine researcher on a team, just not a leader”.
Well, Sheldon has never been impressed with Leonard’s research. Some of that is because Sheldon is a jerk, but we also learned in one episode that Leonard’s work is derivative of I believe some Scandinavian work (and that Fig Newton’s have nothing to do with Sir Isaac).
They’re named after a town in Massachusetts. That was common knowledge where I used to live.
Anu is back. Blech! I can’t stand either the character or the actress.
Regarding Raj: wasn’t there recently in real life some excitement over something that might have been an alien artifact?
Howie & Bernie: Yeah, it’s been long established they do not seem to be the best people to have as friends.
Amy: Last episode and this episode, she’s gotten a lot better at not seeing everything through her Sheldon lens.
Sheldon: Let’s hope Raj is correct about the aliens and they abduct Sheldon in the finale.
Yeah, the college president having a say in what Leonard studies was dumb.
At all the colleges I worked at, except for one, none of the presidents would even know who I was let alone have a remote clue as to what I was working on. And the one exception was just because it was so small and I actually talked to the pres a few times.
As mentioned: it all comes down to money*. If you have a grant for studying something, the college is happy. If you don’t then your chair and sometimes the dean cares.
The closest to top level people caring about what I was doing was when I was a secondary investigator on a mega-grant. It turned out that the “side effect” of getting the grant is the college had to build a new building to house all the new people and gear. So there was some stuff going on about that. That I didn’t have to worry about since I wasn’t the PI or anything. (The grant proposal got a lot of attention and was cited quite a bit. And since I was one of the “authors” people were surprised to see my name on a paper in an odd area for me. But I was just getting money to study what I liked. As long as papers get published thanking the grant, people are happy.)
I was actually hoping that this would be the beginning of the breakup of the group as people finally move the bleep on. Do the writers have any idea as to how often these kind of people (esp. younger ones) move around?
And the “girlfriend” from hell is back. Ugh.
- One college explicitly stated on the front page of their faculty handbook that grant money was not a criteria for promotion. Guess what the only criteria for promotion was?
Maybe it is. Maybe Leonard is so infuriated by Siebert’s reaction that he shops his proposal around to other schools, and one of them says, “Hot damn! That sounds good. We’ll support your efforts to get grant money for it.” Maybe they have a team leader who just died leaving a pot of grant money that could kinda sorta be shifted to Leonard’s project.
We missed this episode, due to our cable being out. But I can’t believe Anu (or the actress portraying her) is still on the show.